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Potage, Ambassadeur
Plunge half pint split green peas in boiling water for five minutes. Thoroughly drain, replace in the pan with three quarts water, add one sliced carrot, one onion, two sliced leeks, two branches celery, two peeled potatoes, one bean garlic, two branches parsley and a two-ounce piece salt pork. Season with a level tablespoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the pan and let gently simmer for one and a half hours. Cut a small carrot, small turnip, the white part one leek and one small white onion in exceedingly small squares. Place them in a small saucepan with three tablespoons raw rice, a pint water, half ounce butter, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper; lightly mix, cover the pan and boil for five minutes, then set in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove and keep hot. Strain the puree of peas through a sieve into another saucepan, add the contents of the vegetable pan to the soup, lightly mix and let boil for five minutes. Remove the stalks and wash half pint fresh sorrel, cut into thin julienne strips, add to the soup with a tablespoon sugar and half ounce good fresh butter; mix well, and let boil for fifteen minutes more, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic French pea soup built in three stages: a long-simmered purée, a separately cooked rice-and-vegetable garnish, and a last-minute shred of sorrel. The measures are pre-metric restaurant shorthand, and one ingredient is now hard to find.
- The measuresHalf a pint of split peas is one cup, about 7 oz dry. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "two saltspoons pepper" is half a teaspoon. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- "One bean garlic"A literal translation of the French une gousse d'ail — one clove, not one head. Filippini's English is full of these calques.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given for the thirty minutes of rice and brunoise, and the book supplies no oven term here either. A moderate oven, around 350F, in a covered pan will serve; the pint of water and five minutes of boiling on the stove presumably start the rice before it goes in.
- Salt, and the porkA level tablespoon of salt into three quarts, plus salt pork, plus more salt in the garnish, is heavy by current taste. Salt the purée lightly at the start and correct at the end, especially since the liquid reduces over ninety minutes.
- Straining the puréeThe instruction to strain through a sieve means pushing the softened peas and vegetables through, not discarding them; the piece of salt pork and the coarse fibrous debris are what stay behind. A food mill does this in a minute; a blender gives a smoother, less traditional texture.
- SorrelFresh sorrel is the point of the dish and rarely stocked in supermarkets; look at farmers' markets in spring, or grow it. Its sharpness is why the tablespoon of sugar is there. Spinach is the usual stand-in but is not acidic — a squeeze of lemon closes some of the gap.
- The final fifteen minutesSorrel collapses to a khaki purée within two or three minutes of heat, and the julienne cut will be lost long before the quarter hour is up. Add it near the end and let it wilt into the soup rather than boil in it.
- Cutting the garnish"Exceedingly small squares" is brunoise, roughly 1/8 inch. Uniformity matters here because the dice cook alongside rice and should finish at the same time.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus the garnish gives about 2 1/2 quarts finished soup, eight to ten servings as a first course.
Potage Ambassadeur belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire of named garnishes, in which a base preparation — here a purée Saint-Germain, the classical pea soup, made with fresh green peas as often as with split ones — is finished with a fixed set of additions that earn it its own name on the menu. The Ambassadeur finish is rice and a chiffonade of sorrel, with Escoffier adding lettuce. Filippini's International Cook Book reflects the world such menus came from: he spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, where French nomenclature was the working language of the kitchen, and his English instructions still carry the French underneath them — a "bean" of garlic, "branches" of celery and parsley. The sorrel is the tell of an older kitchen garden; it was a common household green in Europe and in American gardens well into the nineteenth century, valued for the oxalic tartness that makes it useful against a sweet, starchy pea purée, and it fell out of general use as market produce narrowed.